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Decolonize The New World

Posted on:10 October 2012

By:worker

<table><tr><td><em> Modern residents would hardly recognize the Bay Area as it was in the days of the Ohlones. Tall, sometimes shoulder-high strands of native bunch-grasses...covered the vast meadowlands and the tree-dotted savannahs. Marshes that spread out for thousands of acres fringed the shores of the Bay. Thick oak-bay forests and redwood forests covered much of the hills...</em>

<em>...Packs of wolves hunted the elk, antelope, deer, rabbits, and other game. Bald eagles and giant condors glided through the air. Mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes—now seen only rarely—were a common sight. And of course there was the grizzly bear...These enormous bears were everywhere, feeding on berries, lumbering along the beaches, congregating beneath the oak trees during the acorn season, and stationed along nearly every stream and creek during the annual runs of salmon and steel head.</em>
<em>-</em>from <em>The Ohlone Way</em></td><td><img title="Dreams are the first ingredient of the cauldron of death" src="http://anarchistnews.org/files/pictures/2012/cauldronofdeath.jpg"></td><...

On Columbus Day, 2012, the people of Oakland awoke to find a few dozen banks and other parasitic entities vandalized. Paint was splattered all over the walls, glass littered the ground, and the windows of the City Hall were being repaired that sunny morning. This was the first time in recent memory where the holiday was commemorated with destruction, disdain, and disorder directed at the fine and noble institutions of capitalism and colonialism.

Downtown was abuzz with chatter about what had happened the previous night. The mayor and the rest of the city bureaucracy felt bereaved, having had the windows and doors of their fair temple smashed once again. They complained to the media, lamenting the fact that on Columbus Day, in front of City Hall, there was supposed to be a fan rally for the Oakland A’s wherein all the problems of the world could momentarily be forgotten. Unfortunately for them, no one walking downtown that day could forget so easily. There was still anger in the atmosphere, lingering on despite all hope for the contrary.

The world that grew from the Spanish Missions, the world that created the rows of houses, the paved roads, and the electric lights of the metropolis was attacked the night before Columbus Day. The colonial world, the old world, the linear virus that extends in all directions: this was the target. Before the virus created this metal, glass, and concrete landscape, the land that is now downtown Oakland was a vast marshland filled with countless mammals, birds, and fish. These marshes sustained human life and enabled the Ohlone, Miwok, and other tribes of the area to live without an empire, exterminatory wars, or hunger. The Bay Area was a
giant cauldron of life before colonization, just as it is now largely a cauldron of death.

Let us look no further than the image of Alan Blueford chalked on the bricks in front of City Hall and let us remember how he was killed by a psychopathic police officer while he was on the ground screaming. Let us not forget the indifference of City Hall towards his death or the cold words of Ignacio De La Fuente, the aspiring fascist dictator of the city. And let us not forget that there will be no prosecution of the cop who killed Alan Blueford. This is the system of death, and for just under an hour on the evening of October 7<sup>th</sup> it was assaulted by the chaotic forces of life.

But let us be clear, the forces of life are small, and they are enmeshed within the system of death. Our counterforce is stuck paying rent, working, and stealing whatever we can in order to survive. Our time is mostly out of our hands, and what little extra there is of it is spent trying to combat our enemy.

On Friday, October 5<sup>th</sup>, a small group of people met at the Montgomery BART station on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. This city, the center of colonial expansion in the Bay Area, is host to the consulates of various nation-states. The small group of people, numbering just over thirty, stepped out onto the streets and marched to the Canadian consulate, handing out fliers explaining how the US, Mexico, and Canada are engaged in an exterminatory war against the earth and its inhabitants, determined to extract as many resources from the soil as possible before their system eats itself.

They stood for ten minutes in front of the building while in the sky fighter jets tore through the air during their annual display of fascist technology. After leaving, the group continued to march down the street towards the Mexican consulate near the entrance to the Bay Bridge. As they marched, the people on the sidewalk stared at them and their banners in bewilderment before being distracted by the jets in the air and soon forgetting what they had just seen. Once the group reached the Mexican consulate, a few people read aloud the text of their flier. They were drowned out several times by the terror in the sky. The group dispersed without incident, signaling the start of a long weekend.

The next afternoon, a group of nearly two hundred people met at Justin Herman Plaza on the waterfront in San Francisco. They assembled for an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial march that would make its way through the financial district. Almost immediately, it was clear the police were not going to allow this march to take place. They confiscated a pirate-ship float that had been constructed for the march and destroyed it, they sent in a few old and feeble cops in plain clothes to take pictures of the participants (one of whom was fortunately assaulted and scared away), and declared the march illegal before it had finished walking a single city block. Perhaps knowing their efforts would be cut short, people began hurling paint at the police soon after discovering their presence on the street was a crime. The march lasted ten minutes before being attacked by the police. Twenty people were arrested and taken away to jail. The jets continued to fill the air with terrible noises. The banner that the people had marched behind read RESIST GENOCIDE – DESTROY WHAT IS CIVILIZED.

On the evening of October 7<sup>th</sup>, people met at Oscar Grant Plaza for a march remembering the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by US and NATO forces. Around two hundred people stood in a circle, drank tea, and listened to each other speak their minds about why they were there, where they came from, and what they wanted for the future. It felt like the best parts of the old general assemblies: togetherness, patience, strength. One speaker compared the smashing of windows to slinging rocks at a tank. She did not condemn either tactic. When I heard these words from her mouth, I spent then next twenty minutes realizing that she was correct in her comparison. Both tactics do little damage to their monolithic targets. Smashing bank windows has not brought down capitalism, just as slinging rocks has not freed Palestine. But, just like her, I cannot and will never condemn either tactic. They represent the force of life, desperately lashing against what it knows it cannot immediately stop, but determined to do it just the same. With her words, the speaker reminded me (and possibly others) of the infinite and proud nature of life. The march through downtown was powerful, angry, and left a clear, unmistakable message that could not be ignored as easily as the events of the preceeding days.

I in no way want to glorify or glamorize our inability to effectively destroy the forces and projects of our enemy. We are all caught in a web and other humans have taken the place of the spider. So often we attack each other and leave the web intact. To say we are doing the best we can is an overstatement. We are simply doing what we can, attempting to build off even the smallest success and increase the likelihood that our next efforts will mutate and transcend our past barriers and limitations.

<strong>DOWN WITH DEATH</strong>

<strong>LONG LIVE LIFE</strong>

With direct solidarity to:

-The EZLN, the imprisoned fighters, and the autonomous and indigenous communities of Mexico

"DECOLONIZE THE NEW WORLD..." Here's the most realistic way to bring it about -- I'll have a little chat with my close personal friend Doctor Who, and see if we can borrow the TARDIS for the weekend and just make ever last bit of baddy-bad stuff that's taken place in the Western Hemishere since 1492 go totally bye-bye!

Leave it to this scene to explore ever more esoteric and self-indulgent forms of utter ridiculousness as a compensation for its total lack of real world capability and credibility.

Oh for fuck's sake, STFU already. You think anarchists are infantile, adolescent, blah blah blah. You hate anarchists, but spend inordinate amounts of time trolling anarchist news, and telling people how things should be done. Well, put up or shut up time. All these things that you think would be more worthwhile? GO FUCKING DO THEM! Talk about infantile. Quit fucking whining already and get off your ass and do something. We're all waiting with baited breath for you to begin demonstrating exactly how it's done.

Our word, our song and our cry, is so that the most dead will no longer die. So that we may live fighting, we may live singing. Long live the word. Long live Enough is Enough! Long live the night which becomes a soldier in order not to die in oblivion. In order to live the word dies, its seed germinating forever in the womb of the earth. By being born and living we die. We will always live. Only those who give up their history are consigned to oblivion.

Actually now that I see the title of the image file is "hoodiehijabs" I now know that is exactly what I think it is. I don't mean to sound like an internet troll, but I honestly and sincerely speak from the heart when I say that whoever held or was involved with the making of the banner or approved of it in any way is a fucking piece of shit and has no place in an anarchist movement. Your job is to burn places of worship, not promote them. Islam is a fucking disgusting, parasitic, patriarchal, hierarchical, state-loving religion, JUST LIKE ALL MAJOR RELIGIONS. There is no solidarity to be found between anarchists and women "oppressed" in some other country like France for not being able to wear a hijab and the task of the anarchist is to be endlessly critical of systems of domination and not extend support unconditionally to literally any group that is disliked by a more powerful group. Islamophobia is bullshit. If anarchists are to in any way be in solidarity with, for instance, arabs facing discrimination by the state, and part of that discrimination is based on them also being muslims, it must be (always) a CRITICAL solidarity, where we in NO WAY embrace Islam. It's the same shit with black nationalist and Marxist-Leninist armed struggle groups. We have a CRITICAL solidarity. We reject the paths they've chosen, but we are in solidarity with them as people who fought the state and agreed with some of our politics. And we make those critiques known regularly, whenever we discuss our solidarity with those groups and what it means and how our solidarity is different from those who completely embrace their politics.

Can't Americans just get this shit right? Why does it have to be two extremes of stupidity? On the one hand you have chickenshit pacifist liberals who abhor all violence and then you have these other idiots that don't even have real politics of their own that they could describe to anyone and define themselves solely in opposition to the other group, embracing every act of violence, every "oppressed group," everything that could possibly piss off or scare the pacifist liberals, as if that was the sole goal of revolution. You have all these idiots running around vocalizing support for a Palestinian state, Hezbollah, the Black Panther Party, and other shit and then occasionally calling themselves "anarchists?" Sacco and Vanzetti would be rolling in their graves. They died for your movement that you embrace as a hobby, show some fucking respect for our history and stop shitting on it with your gross statist and identity politics.

"ACAB Allahu Akbar!"

No, no, a thousand times NO. Not in my movement, not on my watch, get the fuck out.

Yeah, anarchy can mean whatever I want it to mean, because that's ANARCHY, BABY! And if you disagree and think it should mean something distinct and specific, well, just look at who's being little miss authoritarian!

Go for a trip to Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Qatar and comme back telling us on your experience promoting anarchy there, if you are still alive by any chance. Especially for promoting atheism and abolition of patriarchy...

OK, will somebody please answer this by talking about the ways that white supremacism benefits from the framing of places like Egypt (ever been there, anon?) as capitals of homophobia? There's a powerful critique of this in radical queer circles now. I don't have the energy for it, but seriously, it's not even anarchists talking about this.

well, I happen to know some Muslim anarchists who are down as fuck, and always make good decisions and have never once done anything authoritarian or hierarchical. religion can be a lot of different things. it can be part of emancipatory movements (look at the history of the middle ages)

That's true, religion bashing is passé in this day and age because the belief system has evolved historically to the point where it transcends superstition and sees social power as from the people and not from a mystical entity. Also Islam is functionally integrated into the social fabric by way of legal and economic mechanisms which treat all of its members as family. C'mon, troll away neo-nazi anarchist factions!

And also explain how tribal indigenous belief systems somehow escape the 'religion label' by those who are most critical of religions. Maybe these people cannot differentiate between churchianity and religiosity? THINK HARDER!

- no church, temple or any other specific place of worship
- no elite priest class who use the belief system to gain and preserve power. Chamans and other medicine men are borderline, but they weren't know to have some political status in hierarchies, other than within their own kind.
- System of belief not being used to explain away social inequities, and hierarchy

WTF is a chief then smartass? Continue to romanticise indigenous hierarchical cultures, I'm staying with the neolithic family clan system which allows me to go off on my own for weeks on end and do individualist exploration stuff and being able to leave the kids with the mother and grandparents to look after, and don't call this patriarchal, it's individualist neanderthal nihilism!!!

Oh, thanks for the reminder. I totally forgot that anarchists never identified religion as a fundamental oppressor that must be opposed. No...Capitalism, No Masters, right? Or can we even oppose the masters since maybe they individually believe in domination and we have to go do battle with the abstraction Capitalism only.

Well you know the master of the hipster clique at the local mall oppresses me because he does weights and psychologically bullies me, but testesterone is an abstraction, right? So would I become an oppressor if I took up a baseball bat? Or is violence a cultural abstraction also? Hey, maybe reality is an abstraction unless you feel it huh?

When we're done with the Muslims, could somebody help me oppress some indigenous people? Their continuing affinity for traditional belief systems is really offending my liberal secular sensibilities!!!

Yeah, it certainly isn't like North American indigenous peoples ever have their spirituality or ancestral claim to lands dismissed as "creationism and ethnic pseudoscience". And I certainly can't think of any instances in which a (percieved) adherence to secular/liberal values is encouraging the conquest of Muslims of theft of resources from their lands...

And we dismiss bourgeoisie economics as pseudoscience and ideological mystification. And, you know, that's true.
What's with the "secular/liberal" shit? So you gotta be a liberal to not buy into the mystification of spirituality?

there is a lot of subtlety to this critique that every response has failed to address. Why are we still on this identity tip? As if the radical queer/woman/ally/poc/duck wasn't already bankrupt enough, we need to add muslim to the mix?

Exactly, and all you people opposing this critique are mad stupid. Just think for one moment about if there was a cross on the banner. You'd all be shitting on it. It's just because Islam's hot right now in the media and the minds of right-wingers that you think it's okay for anarchists to associate with it and embrace it. There are places in the world (I'm not claiming it's many) where Christians are oppressed, for being Christian. It's true. So is this a cause you want to take up? You want to make an ACAB banner with a cross on it and have a totally uncritical solidarity with oppressed Christians? There are also different sects of Christianity oppressing each other. Northern Ireland is a good example, especially if you look back a bit further in the history of it. So maybe as an anarchist during the Troubles, you wouldn't endorse the IRA for obvious reasons, and you wouldn't write letters to the pope and embrace Catholicism as a form of solidarity with the Irish dissidents, but you might express solidarity with them on the level of a colonized people resisting an empire, and have a CRITICAL SOLIDARITY. Why is this shit so hard for all you idiots to understand?

This is one of the reasons American anarchists are stupid. White (and non-white) anarchists think the way to express solidarity with oppressed blacks is to not only study but embrace in some bizarre way various black nationalist movements of the past, as if they represent all black people, and as if their path is identical to the anarchist path. "Anarchists" give at least vocal solidarity to the establishment of states, like the Palestinian state, apparently believing that Palestinian and Israeli people are too dumb to get a critique of the state. "Anarchists" fetishize groups like the Weather Underground and Red Army Faction and look at them as the embodiment of what it meant to be "militant" back then, even though the Weather Underground did not use anarchist methods of struggle and the RAF was even supported by the East German government.

So excuse me for telling you all what your "job" is, but it seems that American anarchists have very little understanding of anarchism and kind of need to be told what it's about because it seems to thrown around as a catch-all term similar to radical. Anarchists are supposed to have a set of principles and stand for things, things many anarchist martyrs have died for. They're not supposed to have wishy-washy politics that boil down to embracing whatever's in vogue and trying find the best position to piss people off with. Anarchism is not about pissing people off and being a dick, it's about attacking the class enemy.